The Power of Words

By Ben Goldberg
Northwestern University

I vividly recall the year that I graduated from children's services and joined the adults in the big sanctuary for Kol Nidrei. It was an incredibly sensory experience: the back-lit stained glass piercing through the dusk, the packed rows of people in white tallitot, the soaring voice of the cantor, the white-robed Torah scrolls taken out of the ark. Looking back, this drama and pageantry seems bizarre. Why all this fuss for an Aramaic legal formula? Why does this, of all things, frame the atonement experience of Yom Kippur?

More famous for its haunting melody than for its content, Kol Nidrei nonetheless speaks to an important Jewish value: the immense power of words. This idea is built into the very structure of the Hebrew language: the word דבר (davar) means both word and thing. Our words are entities unto themselves. Likewise, for the Psalmist, choosing words carefully is the key to a fulfilling life.

In Psalms, parallelism is frequently used to say the same thing in two slightly different ways. So, the parallelism here on the word "badness" (רע in Hebrew) indicates that for the Psalmist, refraining from bad speech is equivalent to refraining from bad deeds. Once again, words are entities unto themselves, with their own power to act in the world.

But like anything that is powerful, words are dangerous. In his book Words that Hurt, Words that Heal, Joseph Telushkin relates a teaching that compares words to arrows and not some stronger weapon like a sword. This is because "if a man unsheathes his sword to kill his friend, and his friend pleads with him and begs for mercy, the man may be mollified and return the sword to its scabbard. But an arrow, once it is shot, cannot be returned, no matter how much one wants to." Anticipating modern literary theory, this metaphor teaches that once our words leave our mouths, they are no longer ours. We cannot control how others receive them or what harm they may cause.

This brings us back to Kol Nidrei. The Torah takes the oaths and promises that we make with extreme seriousness. Consider Numbers 30:3: If a man vows a vow to YHVH, or swears an oath imposing an obligation upon himself, he shall not break his word; all that comes out of his mouth he shall do. Yet these are exactly the type of vows that Kol Nidrei comes to expunge, with the blanket declaration that, "Our vows shall not be valid vows…and our oaths shall not be valid oaths."

By expunging these oaths, Kol Nidrei recognizes the difficulty of living up to the power of our words. Each of us makes promises to ourselves that we end up not being able to keep: to exercise, to go to bed earlier, to be a better friend to someone we know. Each unfulfilled promise represents a potential version of ourselves that we have failed to become. Kol Nidrei begins Yom Kippur by providing a release from these high expectations we set with our words. We leave the synagogue feeling cleansed of the spiritual and psychological schmutz that had accumulated over the past year, ready to face a new chapter in our lives. Kol Nidrei helps us to confront our failures, and provides an opportunity for heshbon ha-nefesh (calling ourselves to account) and consideration of what we can do differently. In the words of Kol Nidrei: "from this Yom Kippur to the next Yom Kippur, may it come to us for good."

Ben Goldberg is a junior at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, studying History and Jewish Studies. He is a past KOACH intern and serves on the Hillel Leadership Council.

[Posted 9/8/10]